Midnight Scouting
by IDespiseTragedy
Summary: Female!Poland found an old folklore book that mentioned a haunted house accessible only on half-moon midnight and decided to scout the house. The place turned out to be a timeless maze far more problematic than she had been prepared to face. Not only did she meet various ghosts from different centuries, but she also found Female!Lithuania there.


Credit: Thank you so much my beta readers, _Kleon Luminia_ & _ChocoVanille_; also thanking_OrgyMemberXVII _for the wonderful suggestions

Disclaimer: If Hetalia were mine, Himaruya would be the one writing this fanfic XD

Warning: Not recommended for those who are uncomfortable reading feminine slash and ghostly apparition stories

Author's confession:

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. This story could do with the usual male Poland and Lithuania, but I switched their gender to satisfy my urge to write a shoujo-ai relationship with sexual innuendo.

Cultural note: Latin was the most popular language in the multinational Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, especially during the seventeenth-century, so Poland can speak it fluently in this fic

* * *

**Midnight Scouting**

_"Only when the half-moon hath risen in the darkened, charcoal sky, wilt thou behold the ruins of a house in the forest-cloaked ground on the other side of this lake. 'Twas an abode so ancient that evil spirits had taken a liking to weave their evil schemes. No soul who had dared to enter it ever returned. O wanderer, remove thyself from its __circumambience__; beware of the peril that devil's nest mayeth bring!"_

"Yeah, right."

Sneering, Poland threw the book back onto the motley of objects at one corner of her attic. She inspected her surroundings with a satisfied look, and then stretched her arms upward. Now that nearly a third of the occupants of her attic had been gathered in one pile, the room seemed more spacious.

_'Will all these fit in my car trunk when I deliver them to the orphanage tomorrow?'_ Poland wondered. Then, another, worse realization dawned on her. _'Ugh, moving them all from the third floor to the garage will be a pain in the ass; they'll need, like, five up-and-down trips at least.'_

She heard her stomach rumbling and looked at her watch—Lithuania's gift the previous Christmas. Its shorter hand settled on number seven, while its longer hand was in-between three and four.

_'I know!' _Poland grinned at her "brilliant" idea. _'I'll drag—oops, invite—Liet._ _She can help me carry the heavy stuff. After that, we can share the three bottles of _krupnik_ I bought today. One of them has stronger cinnamon aroma; the second one, cardamom; and the third, orange. Hmm, __I wonder_ _which of those honey liqueurs she'll love best?' _With that, Poland hummed merrily while hopping down the stairs and heading toward the kitchen.

While waiting for the _zupa_ _szczawiowa_ to boil, Poland's thoughts returned to her best friend. Lately, she had so frequently made Lithuania spend their time together in her house and nowhere else. _'Time for a change of pace,'_ she thought as she gave the sorrel soup a stir. _'That rumored haunted house near Milicz will totally be a good place to start—which is why I'm going to check that out first.'_

After dinner, it took less than two hours' drive to reach Milicz, since Poland only made one stop at the gas station. The journey remained uneventful until Poland parked her silver Audi at the edge of the woodland that bordered Milicz. She took out a pair of waterproof boots from the trunk and replaced her shoes; since the region was rich with lakes, she expected most of its terrain to be miry.

Armed with a camera, a hockey stick, a bottle of water, a torch bicycle helmet, a spare torchlight, and batteries, she marched gallantly under the cloak of the night. There was a persistent stillness in the groves; never did the hoot of owls break the muteness. It gave her the feeling that the silence of the place had lain unstirred by mortal footfall ever since time immemorial.

After about twenty yards, she reckoned that the woodland through which she progressed was more a maze of bafflement and eeriness than a field of adventure. There were no landmarks, no shoeprints; while the distant hoots of the owls sounded as though they were warning her not to come any closer. Even the towering trees grew thicker and thicker as if the nature itself were marshaling them against her advance. The earth seemed unearthly with the rise of ground and the foliage cutting out the moonlight. The forest was seemingly vaster than when seen from outside, and was interwoven by the endless labyrinthine volumes of penumbral leaves.

A swishing noise slashed the sullen sky. Poland stepped back, heart beating fast, wondering into what dreadful place she was bringing herself. She listened intently, and then, upon perceiving that it was none other than a cloud of bats swarming amid the foliage, she exhaled in relief.

_'Just because you're here at night, that doesn't mean you should stop and cower every three minutes,'_ her inner voice reproached her. All the same, she couldn't help but feel relieved that the search amidst such a tenebrific forest did not last for more than a quarter of an hour. The building across the creek was within sight at last.

It was the charred ruins of a small two-story house, of which outlines were blurred by erstwhile cypresses and hedges of unkempt shrubs. Discounting its air of ageless neglect, there was something dismal about the rubble—something that inhered in the mantling tangle of unchecked ivy vines, in the furtive windows, and the twisted forms of the funereal vegetation. The walls of the great gray building were as silent as those of a sepulcher and there was no sign of human occupancy all around the crumbling debris. However, as though a stranger's voice had spoken to warn her, Poland had the most peculiar feeling that something had been lurking there, waiting to ambush visitors. A growing edginess dispersed in her mind; she could no longer distinguish the rustles of the leaves from the weaving whispers of maledict schemes.

Poland vigorously shook her head, trying to dismiss the ill-defined uneasiness that was poisoning her brain. She took a deep breath and pressed on, albeit with stiff strides. The wind hit her with a buffeting gust, making her coat snap like a flag and her hair tangle in quivers. Although her heart pounded louder and louder the closer she came to the abandoned house, she consoled herself with the thoughts of all the fun she would share with Lithuania. It would be good if she managed to scare her best friend and make that girl cling to her while screaming at the top of her lungs.

The shades of the night drew on, and the house came into view at last. Yet as Poland arrived at the edge of the murky creek that separated the house from her, she could not help but gulp. Under the wan light of the half-moon, she thought she saw vaguely moving things below the ripple-free surface that seemed to vanish once she squinted; there were submerged faces in the body of water that appeared and disappeared like livid bubbles before she could make out their features. And, peering across the creek, she wondered why she had not seen the shadow of that abandoned house in the stagnant waters. It was ashen gray and unperturbed, that it seemed to have stood for inestimable ages between the moribund creek and the equally moribund sky. It looked more antediluvian than time, coeval with the unknown depth of a lightless chasm.

Poland retracted a few steps back. _'I'm not afraid,'_ she told herself. _'I need to go around this creek since there's no boat anyway.'_

When she reached the opposite bank of the creek, an unknown heaviness fell upon her, dragging her pace as though a prisoner's ball and chains had shackled her ankle. The house was a few paces away, yet a minatory air dwelled upon its ground and crept unseen but palpable along its decrepit walls.

"_Vade retro!_" an unfamiliar female voice interdicted Poland, susurrous yet commanding.

Poland stopped dead in her track. That was Latin, all right. Most European nations knew Latin, or at least some of it, but certainly not to the extent that they would _think_ in that dead language. Whoever said that phrase was not her inner voice.

Even so, why did the unknown voice tell her to get back? Poland took a rather deep breath and retorted, "_Audaces fortuna iuvat_." Fortune favors the brave.

Poland entered the grounds and followed the untrodden path leading to the front door, but regretted her decision at once. There, as she stepped forward, a stealthy somberness had closed in upon the ruins and the sable sky darkened even more above her, as if it had been merely waiting for her to enter before it descended. The surrounding trees, like phantoms, grew fainter as they receded into the seemingly faraway background. The air was stiflingly oppressive, like a dingy vault that had been sealed for centuries.

Hesitation had filled her even before her hand poised at the door handle. She cast one rearward glance. The same eerie ground lay behind her. Never before had she stumbled upon a place so devoid of life. Still, paranoia was not a trait she would readily embrace. With a long sigh, she pushed the door open and the slab of wood swung inward with a pronounced creak of unoiled hinges.

Once inside, Poland found the temperature dropping from cold to arctic. Her breath formed plumes upon plumes of vapor in front of her, their ghostly whiteness blooming in stark contrast with the pitch-black hallway.

_'Sheesh, if it's already _this_ cold in October, how would it be like in January?'_

The despairing floor condemned her weight upon it, shrieking with every step she took. Although Poland switched on the torchlight of her bicycle helmet, the illumination the yellow beam afforded was lonesome and indistinct, while the thronging shadows of the hall were unexplainably multitudinous and constantly shifted with an eldritch disquiet. Hence, she placed a large rock to serve as a doorstop, hoping that the extra light from the waning moon, however dim, would brighten her way.

Poland found herself in a single straight corridor with four rooms leading off it, two to each side. The first room on her left was less than three yards away from the threshold. It was a room of which fusty shadows could never be wholly dissipated by her flashlight, its dead air cumbrous with the mustiness of years. Her feet creaked and crackled over the bare planking, and her outstretched hand touched a wall from which the paper was hanging in ribbons. The window was so thick with dust that she could not see the trees outside more than their silhouettes forming gloomy map-like pattern. The wall on the east side had a door adjoining to next room.

No less musty than its predecessor, this room was fairly large and lined with the furniture meant for a bedchamber—dresser, console table, desk, chairs, chaise longue, and even chamber pot which, albeit had their fair share of wear and tear, did not fail to exhibit the mastery of their makers' chisels, though, regrettably, did not match the architectural style of the edifice. Just then, the sound of the howling wind caused her to glance out of the window, through which small and deep-set panes of clinging mold she could see only the irrefrangible, pressing darkness that seemed to have swallowed the whole place.

But something else accompanied the scream of the wind. Her ears caught the sibilation of an ominous voice, ethereal and distant, like that of a spirit that rose from the grave. It was the same inexpressibly grim and nerve-sapping voice that had warned her to stay away from this place in its intimation of transcendental macabre.

"_Sero_" was the single Latin word that the voice—the same high-pitched child-like voice that had spoken to her earlier—announced. Too late.

Poland had no need to ask what she was late for. All too readily, she understood the nameless dread that had inspired the author of the book she had found in her attic. At the same time, her eyes found the object in the center of the room.

It morbidly resembled a casket in shape and size.

Why the house owner had kept a coffin inside the house Poland did not want to know. It was the time to kiss goodbye her old motto: "curiosity is stronger than fear." She sprinted back to the landing through which she had first come in, only to be perplexed by its transformation: the house seemed to have expanded to the size of a mansion. The supposedly eight-yard walk between the room and the door to the outer world now stretched into the fearsome length of a rugby field.

Poland's eyes bulged with dread as she saw the distant door. _Closed_ door. She did not even hear the sound of the door closing. No. It was not the same door. The one from earlier had no mullions in it.

_'How?'_

With every tremulous step, the exit did not feel to come nearer at all. The hallway was an endless loop of bafflement and ghostliness. She was trapped in a long, dark corridor where frosty air held its unremitting sway. With an ever-growing fear chilling her heart, she prayed, _'God, please let me out of here alive. I promise I'll go to church every Sunday instead of twice a year. And I'll never trouble Lietuva again; in fact, I'll be good to everyone I know.'_

Hearing the tread of feet further back in the time-forgotten house, Poland vowed to herself not to look back. One step. Two steps. She had the strangest feeling of being followed. Through her growing hebetude, she advanced, endeavoring to reach for the door that refused her approach. The ground beneath was soft like carpet, even though she was sure she had been striding on bare planks on her way in.

Then something long, cold, and quick brushed the side of her leg.

Poland squeaked and, without thinking, instinctively burst into the nearest room on her right.

The back of Poland's neck prickled. The very dust and quietude in this room seemed to tingle with some otherworldly aura. But most of all, sitting on an easy chair by the fireplace was a young woman arrayed in mid-seventeenth-century attire. Her "_mentliks_", worn over the one-piece pullover gown known as "_letnik_," was not lined with fur and even thin enough for summer; and yet, if the inclement temperature of the house affected her, she did not show it. On the contrary, Poland's teeth were chattering despite her winter coat. The woman, who glowed with preternatural phosphorescence, hummed an old tune with her attention chained to the piece of tablecloth she was crocheting. Although the easy chair steadily rocked to and fro, the woman's figure remained still, like a taper that burned for the dead in a windless crypt.

Poland's mind told her to scram, to flee, to leave that accursed place, but her feet refused to move. She stood immobile like one who was afflicted with palsy. Numbness was creeping through her like a contagion, spreading to each and every vein, freezing her body as she stood.

The apparition reached out for the basket of yarns on the small table next to her chair. The ball of yarn she was attempting to procure fell onto the floor and rolled towards the doorway, where Poland was standing. Again Poland willed her feet to move, and again she found her entire body petrified. But even as the diaphanous woman left the chair and bent to pick up the stray yarn, the hem of her gown hovered five inches above the ground. As soon as she retrieved the yarn, which had come into a halt near Poland's right foot, she looked up at the uninvited visitor.

For a moment, the two girls' stares met and Poland experienced a shiver through the marrow of her bones. It was sharp, electric shock-like sensation that left her momentarily stunned. A vision came into Poland's mind: the ghost would stab the crochet hook into her eye. She squeezed her eyes shut then, unable to make any more movement.

One second elapsed. Two, five, ten…

Poland reopened her eyes. Before her, there was nothing but an empty room; the apparition had vanished into the shadowy realm of the night. She wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, while her legs still shook beneath her. The breath she had unconsciously been holding in now burst forth from her lungs. She inhaled deeply several times, staring at the spot where the ghost had been moments before. Only her pounding heart testified that the evanescent entity had indeed existed. Long she stood there, half-expecting half-fearing to hear the cackle of the dead. However, there was nothing, not even the ruffling of a gown.

Collecting herself, Poland stumbled back through the door; her heart still beat ponderously and her hand shaking as she gripped the handle. _'Leave!' _a harsh whisper resounded in her head, but somehow she knew that the voice came from somewhere beyond the door she herself had just closed. _'Flee this place now!'_

Upon exiting the room, Poland perceived that the hallway now showed a different size and décor. The damask pattern of the wallpaper looked more crowded than its previous version and the paper peelings were at different spots. Her face coated in a sheen of cold sweat, she questioned herself, _'What exactly is this place?'_

Poland ran along the hallway in the frenzied hope of eventual escape as if she had been a thief pursued by police constables. Even so, regardless how many steps she had trodden, the front door kept distancing itself interminably from her.

After a short interval, she came again to where she had started. Again she turned and fled; and once more, after similar wanderings and like struggles, she came back to the inevitable starting point.

Poland felt like crying; how true it was the adage about how the value of a friend could only be discovered once she had been lost. All those times, Lithuania had always been there to comfort her. But now, she was on her own. Alone and scared and tired.

After so many repeats of the same fruitless circle, she resigned herself to her fate and made no further effort to leave. Not only were her feet sore, but her bones also felt as though they had been ingrained with lead. All hope of survival dispersed into hopelessness and all motivation to attempt escape benumbed, Poland sank on the floor of one of the rooms. That room was interspersed with innumerable volumes of books, which had overflowed from the shelves and lay in piles in the corners or were stacked all round at the base of the cases. Even so, it had a funereal suggestion in its form.

She glimpsed at the window. Much to her horror, what had been an empty screen now delineated the silhouette of a man. The man, vested in a _delia_ from the late eighteenth-century, was scribbling onto a piece of parchment on a grand mahogany desk before the window. Only his tenuous back was clearly visible, and he occasionally dipped his quill into an inkbottle. Next to it, laid a sealing wax stick, a candle, and a _buława_—military ceremonial mace.

Poland knew she ought to scramble, to remove herself from his presence, but her feet were rooted to the ground. Her muscles refused to move yet again. Her heart thundered in her chest, while a ghastly chill prickled her skin. Fear was gnawing on her more unrelentingly than a dog on a bone. She prayed with all her heart that the man wouldn't turn around—or, worse still, turn his head into a full circle—and spook her.

He did not swerve, but without pausing from his writing, he spoke in Polish, though using the vernacular of three centuries earlier, "You should leave. The moment she finds you here, she'll have me kill you."

The fear-induced strength from the man's words spurred Poland's feet. As she scampered to the lengthy passageways of the hall again, she bumped onto a grandfather clock right outside the room, which had not been there before; the corridor had changed again.

"Ouch!"

Rubbing her dizzy head, Poland stepped back. Removing her fingers from her forehead, she perceived that they were wet with splotches of blood. She groaned in her mind: could this be any worse?

Blood still streaming from the side of her forehead, Poland glanced cautiously to the left and right; she searched while hoping at the same time not to find any more night prowlers. Heat came from one of the rooms further back and approached the welcoming warmth.

The heat originated from a busy kitchen. At one corner, there was a beehive oven into which a kitchen maid was shoving charcoals amid the tangle of firewood. At the center of the room stood a large table on which another was crushing some herbs with pestle and mortar, its fresh aroma wafting headily towards her. On the other side of the table, what seemed to be the head cook—the oldest woman in the room—was shaping the dough of _pierogi_ dumpling into circles using the rim of a cup. "Jadwiga, have you prepared the water?"

Her companion, who was returning dried pots to their shelves, glanced at the clock on the top shelf and answered, "In a minute."

The first one to notice Poland was another maid, who was sharpening a knife to a grinder on a smaller table nearby. She sniffed the air and apparently caught the scent of Poland's dripping blood. Without taking her glance off the intruder, the ghost quietly remarked, "We shall make a hearty _czernina_ today."

The other women stared at Poland all at once, causing her goosebumps to sprout. Did they have to look at her in that way right after announcing they were going to make the soup that conventionally consisted of poultry blood, herbs, and dried fruits? Given the absence of duck or other meat ingredients within sight, were they going to use her as the substitute for a duck?

Then the tallest of the kitchen maids squeaked, "She's here!"

Poland had caught a glimpse of panic in the five kitchen workers' faces before they disappeared into swirls of air, leaving the kitchen vacuous and cold. With them, the dough, broth, and all other ingredients vanished into ether. Even the oven fire died down. In an instant, the kitchen looked as if it had been relinquished for years, with cobwebs and accumulated dust.

Poland's eyebrows knitted. Something was not right. Those ghosts had no reason to be frightened of her. But she did not figure out what had terrified them so until she turned around and made her way back toward the door.

An eleven-year-old girl was standing on the doorway. Her skin was nearly as white as the nightgown covering her thin frame. Amid the curtain of her disheveled sable hair, peeked a pair of red, puffy eyes that could only belong to one who had been weeping for hours. With the first glimpse of the ghost, a sense of unknown melancholy pervaded Poland's spirit.

The little girl spoke,_ "Hortatus eram ne venias, sed monitum contemsisti."_

_"I urged you not to come here, but you disregarded_ _my warning,"_ Poland recognized the Latin what was more, this was the same high-pitched voice that had told her to turn back before she reached the haunted house.

_"Moriturus es,"_ the little girl continued with an immense grief in her tone. Her hands were outstretched, reaching for Poland with long nails and swollen fingers that never fumbled.

Poland instinctively swung her hockey stick; how could she stand still after said ghost announced that she was about to die and even reached out for her? Yet, even though she strongly suspected that the stick would go through the ghost rather than hit its body, a pang of guilt invaded her guts: a ghost her adversary might be, the dead one was still a child. She closed her eyes, unable to bear witnessing the assault.

The hockey stick felt as light as though it had hit empty air when it reached the child ghost's form. Opening her eyes, Poland faced the doorway leading to the obscurity of the hallway. The apparition was nowhere to be seen.

But Poland knew something else was here with her. Her heart beat so loud as to nearly deafen her. She felt that presence—the disquiet that made each individual hair stand up on the back of her neck. The darkness … something was lurking in that darkness. A pulsing hunger. A sense of rising predation that fueled the gelidity in the air. From behind, a malodorous perfume bred, no less overpowering than the stench of dead mice neglected for days.

Glancing over her shoulder, Poland saw with immense horror that the ghost had transmogrified. Purplish veins began to sprout upon her skin, which rippled and moved. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, evoking the feeling that being hurled into the unknown depth of an abyss would be a certainty Poland could not escape. The apparition's flesh solidified—no longer ethereal and transparent, but tangible enough to grasp and to hold. To hurt the living.

".אותך תמצא עדיין שלי הציפורניים ;שלי הקטן הכבש ,לברוח" _("Livroach, hacavesh hakatan sheli; hatzipornayim sheli adayin timtzah othach.")_

From her perfunctory knowledge on Hebrew, Poland recognized this to be a scorn: take flight, my little lamb; these claws of mine will find you still. Even so, the ghost's voice no longer belonged to an eleven-year-old girl; it sounded guttural and masculine like that of a toad's croak and a crow's caw combined.

Poland's tongue and lips refused to obey her attempt to shout. An icy paralysis appeared to have seized her organs of articulation and was blocking her throat. It was a blessing that she could still move her feet, and she dashed through the doorframe, out of the kitchen where evil was lurking. The ghost rose in a flurry of teeth and claws, cackling mockingly, and launched herself in Poland's pursue.

The hallway had altered itself again. Cressets were now burning along the extensive, narrow corridor, though she had not perceived the time and agency of their lighting. No paper wrapped the walls, and their crude masonry suggested that they were built as early as the thirteenth-century.

Poland ran headlong through the mysteriously lit corridor, crushing straw-littered floor with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear. She dared not turn back, but she suspected the ghost glided behind her, pursuing her to no end, for she still sensed the same abominable presence wherever she went.

After another vain attempt to reach the front entrance, Poland took a random door on her right. It led to a spacious drawing room with elegantly upholstered chairs and spindly tables—a perfect spot for a leisurely break, except for the black-haired head that was now emerging from the wall. Gradually, the neck came out, too, and then the upper torso. Poland did not wait until the ghost's full body appeared. She rushed back to the corridor again and scurried up the narrow stairs.

The first room upstairs could not shelter Poland from her pursuer either. Within seconds after she burst through the door, the diabolical apparition cleaved through the wall as easily as shark on water. It seemed to her that she could not escape from that demonic spirit. In her haste, she stumbled over a stool, and the clangor only invited menacing cackle from her insidious chaser.

She fled from the ghastly chamber into the outer darkness of the corridor again. Yet, running was useless; the ghost kept chasing her like ineluctable shadow. But despite the repeat of the same horror, fright urged Poland to keep trying for another room. Her ill fortune remained unchanged until she tried the sixth time.

It was nothing like all the other rooms she had entered; the nauseating odor of freshly drawn blood hung in the air, so thick and haunting with singular persistency that it gave her the conviction she had stumbled upon the chamber of death. Poland found herself in the presence of a four-poster bed, a chamber pot, a cupboard of toys, a rocking pony, a dollhouse, a small dressing table, and a wardrobe. The brickwork was stained brown-black close to the ground, showing the remains of burning. Still, the room would have looked like a regular bedchamber for a young girl, had it not for the bloodstained broken chains and scribbles on the floor.

On the wooden planks was an arcane circle with seven-pointed star, each point bearing different unhallowed material: a grimoire, a bloody dagger, a goblet full of dark liquid, a bunch of plants, a goat's head, entrails, and a lock of human hair.

Poland cringed and headed to the door straightaway. Before her hand touched the handle, however, she began to identify scratching noises from the other side. They were no rat noise; they were such as would be made by the claws of a beast on solid woodwork, except that those scratches always came in threes—the mocking of the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. She stopped dead in her track, her brain and legs growing numb with a paralyzing dread. The monstrous, fiendish scratching grew louder and more frantic by the second, assaulting her ears as she stood there—the sting and burn of each impact running straight into her head.

A sudden conjecture grasped Poland: the ghost _could_ _not_ enter this particular room even though she had no trouble passing through the walls of the other rooms.

Poland glanced back at the arcane circle on the floor in the middle of the room. Perhaps this satanic litany had something to do with the room's immunity to the ghost. Repulsive and unnerving as it was, this was the best alternative she had by far.

Poland sat at an empty space on the floor, away from the door and from the demonic ritual circle. But though she remained idly there, terror reigned; it was around her like the meshes of a sable net, closing in mercilessly upon her anxious mind and drowning all reason within her. Horrendous thoughts besieged her as she tossed through endless minutes and sat hugging her knees staring at the somber furniture, which loomed like some baleful audience in the shades. The scratching on the door became even plainer, with a hideous, tearing vibrancy that plotted against her peace and muttered abominably of nameless things in demonian tongue.

Even so, God made no answer and showed no relenting, nor did He give any favoring sign when she implored in her timorous prayer.

Poland's stomach turned as she gazed upon vacancy for long hours. With an action that was becoming a habit in times of inquietude, she twisted a lock of her hair round and round in her fingers. Amidst the disheartening place and the turbid, timeless air, only despondence lingered. Dread was a serpent lurking in the disconsolations of her stomach only to wring her guts in its deadly coil in the absence of hope. Its venom poisoned her senses with something more unnerving than she could bear, unsuppressed and irredeemable.

How Poland wished she could go back to her usual flippant self! She had never been claustrophobic in the past, but now the room started to feel too narrow and cramped, with the walls threatening to close in upon her and the ceiling to press her down, like the sides and lid of a casket. She could never seem to draw a full breath, let alone get up to leave. A voice inside her head told her that she would bruise her head against an inexorable obstruction that seemed to be within inches above her. Even if her hands and feet had thrashed about in demented panic, her limbs would have met hard, unyielding barriers. All she could do was to stay there, shaking, alone with her stupendous fear and her even grislier apprehensions.

The persistent scratches on the door had served merely to intensify the charnel oppression within the room. The noise was muffled and far off at times; then it seemed to draw near, as if it were inches away from Poland. It took on a strange resonance; then it became almost inaudible; and suddenly, for a while, it ceased. In the interim, she heard a sinister laughter. Then the damnable clawing sound began once again and prolonged till the seeming lapse of nocturnal centuries.

After a stupendous stint of endless cark, Poland yielded to insanity, frantic thoughts milling in her brain like crowded maggots in a corpse. Old memories and present fears tangled in strange confusion, steeping with the same hellish blackness. She recalled, among many other things in that tumult of disconnected ideas, that she was yet to improve her reputation in the upcoming world cup, especially after Polish soccer hooligans clashed with Mexican navy cadets. England ridiculed her because the Polish ex-president made a fuss about the standard security check at the London Heathrow. And she herself laughed at the Polish exorcists for warning shoppers to be on their guard against the forces of darkness after a supermarket priced a packet of goats' cheese 6.66 złotys. Look at what those forces of darkness did to her now…

At length, sick with longing for a reprieve from the evil shadows of amorphous beings that prowled the haunted house, Poland tried to distract her mind with the workmanship of the rocking pony. Ponies had always been her obsession; when she was little, she used to own a few of rocking ponies herself, and in the recent years she even had a real one as a pet back home.

She approached the rocking pony and, as soon as she stood next to it, she trailed her fingers over its expanse, groaning in her mind, _'Who'd take care of my pony if I die here?' _She pressed the horse's saddle, and the toy began to sway back and forth; its functionality remained unimpaired although its paint had worn off and its parts were chipped through the scorn of years.

Poland stood there in silence, following the rocking pony with her gaze. Seconds upon dragging seconds passed by. The swinging of the toy horse did not stop. While the minutes waned and waned away, those to-and-fro movements of the rocker's curved course prolonged.

On and on and on…

Then for the first time, it came to Poland's notice that the vibrant rasping on the door had ceased. Her mind drugged with weariness and want of rest, she strained her ears and listened in a state of nightmarish apprehension: the transformation of the scratches on the wooden door into the creaks of the rocking horse against the floor had lasted for quite a while.

The mirror of the dressing table moved by itself. Poland held her breath. The oval mirror was adjusting its angle, its surface glinting when it caught the beam of her torch helmet. During that split second, Poland glimpsed a reflection in the mirror: the silhouette of a girl with long, black hair.

Poland's eyes widened in horror. A chill, not entirely unknown, rose out of the rocking pony and crested the very air of the room, spilling intimidation down into the shadowed recesses, chasing back what little remained of Poland's hopes for survival. In her asphyxiating fright, the bedroom became a scaffold—one tug from her executioner, and her neck would be tethered and her soul would fall into the netherworld recesses to be welcomed only by the gruesomeness of subterranean creatures.

She had to get out of here. _Now_. In her panic, Poland bolted for the door. But she came into a halt midway. The door knob was wriggling, struggling to be turned. A sinister laugh oozed into the room from the gap below the door. She swiveled. The rocking of the toy horse did not stop either. More than one pursuer wanted her dead.

Poland wheezed, trying to suck air. Catching a glimpse of the wall-mounted bric-a-brac shelf, she fumbled, searching for a push-button, a lever, anything that would open to a secret room of some sort. She even turned every object and tested whether any of them would result in the opening of a hidden door.

Finally, the rotating wall, which granted her the respite she sought for, was dubious enough to be regarded as a safe haven. The hidden room behind the haunted chamber was immersed in inviolate caliginosity—blackness pooled about it like a lake of tar, leaving it forlorn and marked as infrangible. From the dankness of the air, it seemed that the room was windowless. Despondency was perpetual. In here, the sense of time obliterated itself; there was only a melanite stagnation, in which eons and minutes were equally drowned.

At lengthy and regular intervals came a remote, muffled groan. Insufferable doubt and bewilderment awoke and brooded noxiously in Poland's terror-stricken mind. Her torch helmet did very little to lessen the pitch-black gloom. She extended her hockey stick forward, trying to prod whatever object that might hinder her in this lightless space. There was nothing there—no furniture, no amenities, no sign of occupancy; the soot black enclosure was empty. In the end, it was not the stick that encountered such an object; her right foot bumped onto something solid as she paced the room.

Heart plummeting, she looked down. Unless the dim light of her torch helmet was playing tricks on her eyes, the thing lying on the floor had a great resemblance to her best friend's figure. There was Lithuania's shoulder-length brown hair, for a start—even though the ailing light made it look mauve-colored. Then, there was that medium-build frame. But overriding all else was the handbag that lay next to the figure: it was the leather bag that Poland had bought for Lithuania's latest birthday.

"Liet?" falteringly, she called, her voice ending up a pitch higher.

TO BE CONTINUED


End file.
